Der Kürenberger

Der Kürenberger (flourished 1160) was the earliest of the German poet-musicians called minnesingers known by name.

Probably an Austrian nobleman from near Linz, Kürenberger wrote proud and imperious love songs that lack the homage to women expressed by later minnesingers and their French or Provençal models. His poems are written in stanzas of four lines, rhymed in pairs and divided into half lines by a caesura (pause). Because this form is used in the German heroic epic the Nibelungenlied (and is therefore called the “Nibelungenlied strophe”) and because Kürenberger’s style has an epic-dramatic quality, it has been conjectured that he may have written a lost German epic on which the unknown author of the Nibelungenlied based his poem.